April 19, 2006 Archives
So I forced myself downtown to attend my boss' husband's novel launch (he's an U Ottawa academician), in a chic biblio cafe on the Plateau called "Salon B" on St-Laurent (just past the Parc des Amériques, corner Rachel). The right choice: perfect blue skies, and somewhat warm in the dark white-stripped zipper sweater I wore. I strolled from the McGill campus through the ghetto, stopped at the Metro in the Galeries du Parc to get myself some healthier snacks (sultana raisins, roasted corn kernels), and then at my grandma's who lives nearby. Then I bussed up, and got there right on time, stood there for a few long minutes (my boss + colleagues weren't there yet) watching the crowd of lit people happily chat in the white-walled small room with hardwood floors that is the upper section of Salon B (we never saw the footbridge they said they would deploy).
They served a delicious bruschetta with a vertically-aligned thin crisp piece of bacon, and pita bread with a hummus dip. After the presentations, they served panini bread with brie cheese and mango or apple, and two simple salads, one Greek (cubes of feta, red onions, tomatoes, the usual), and the other Italian (basalmic vinegar, what seemed to be dried game meat).
The underlying themes of the novel remind me a lot of Murakami's latest. Oedipian thematic (in this novel, father and son also don't get along, father dies -the premise to story-, and he ends up sleeping with his mistress), and general exploration of death (characters dying, finding their "spirit"/influence passed on through other characters).
Finished the evening walking down St-Laurent, getting a green tea + ginger ice cream from Ripples (which just reopened for the summer) - and I quickly note that ginger in ice cream is such a delight, gently spicy as it melts on your tongue - and hung out at Wee's for 30 mins, and finally walked back down on Parc, and commuted back home hard asleep, masterfully waking up at the right moments.
Basically, through the Mind of the Hive (or its particular entry on American Chinese cuisine, full of answers to my identity-related questions spilling over to the topic of food - and it plants a dagger firmly over the fact that GENERAL TAO'S CHICKEN DOES NOT EXIST IN CHINA - that's productive North American Asian activism in action).
Through that, I got info about Chinese spices. It comes intuitively, that for any sort of food to have its distinctive taste, it starts with spices. So I went to get "Arabic spices" in order to make Arabic food - which was as simple as cinnamon, nutmeg and other things like that, but I didn't know that. I want to get cumin, eventually if I also find that low-grade greasy unexpensive mutton meat for cooking northern Chinese and more generally central Asian cuisine that requires it (all the mutton meat I find in regular supermarkets is super-expensive lamb from Quebec farms (in Charlevoix, available at public markets - they even make merguez!), and from Down There. We have star anise at home, I think, and put it in the curry, I guess.
But there's something called Sichuan pepper, which is not black pepper, and which could be that strange spice that was in my lamb stir-fry or fried spinach taken at Niu Kee, or made into a fine powder in its Japanese variety (to be sprinkled on ramen? is it this one?). The Chinese name of the stuff is 花椒 (huajiao/fatsiew?), and sounds familiar. This is something I definitely should ask any of the grandmothers one day - too much of basil/thyme in what we cook. -_-;